Rochas / Spring 2012 RTW

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What’s the impulse that’s leading some of our most intriguing and imaginative designers—Miuccia Prada, Raf Simons at Jil Sander, and now Marco Zaninifor Rochas—toward the fifties? The decade has become a rich vein to mine this season, resulting in the collective gestures of bella figura pencil skirts, Dovima-worthy opera coats, ornate and elegant (although not exactly lady-lady) shoes, soigné coiffures, winged sunglasses, and veiled hats (and of the ski variety, at that). And yet, with this rather wonderful collection, Zanini, a smart, thoughtful, and soulful designer, wasn’t even really considering that time specifically. This despite the exquisite duchesse satin coats, shimmering metallic sweaters—cable-stitched on one side, gently voluminous in back—and a singularly sensational kiwi-green sequins-on-gazar full-skirted dress that seemed to sigh with delight as it swayed past, as if headed straight to the set of High Society.

On a trip to preview the collection days before in Milan (Rochas is made in Italy, and Zanini lives there), the designer mentioned he had been thinking about all of his favorite movies, directors, and cinematic genres, and whirled them up in his mind, montage-sequence style; a “vortex,” he called it. Out of that came his headscarves (à la Rita Tushingham in A Taste of Honey) and towering mirror-encrusted platforms (science fiction) or toying with a kitsch color palette straight out of John Waters. After all, wouldn’t Waters, just like Zanini did here, call a candy-sweet shade of pink “milkshake”?

Zanini was at pains to point out that his collection wasn’t a literal rerun of the fifties, however, and he’s right. Once you strip away the styling gestures of cat-eye shades and impressively constructed chignons, you’re left with an awful lot of clothes that connect with the here and now in their cleanness, rigor, and richly nuanced urbanity. (For instance, all the black he did in the collection needed to be three-dimensional, according to the designer, because replacing that flatness with a sense of depth and life meant graphically weaving the gazar, or playing satin off of jacquard silk.)

In its way, just as much as this is about the idea of examining and reclaiming a pre-feminist era, this sense of the 1950s is about designers like Zanini and Simmons returning to a world when clothes had no other purpose than to make a woman look pulled together and finished—all while being really well-made to boot. It’s a collective urge to engage in the desire to be responsible for creating clothes that will outlast the headlong rush of runway trends. Next season, you’re not being asked to step back in time at Rochas, but to take pleasure in wearing something that will stand the test of time.